Charlemagne: Pieces of paper

Would a European constitution really change the world?

WAKE up in Washington. Pay attention in Beijing. Something big is happening in Brussels. At a summit that was starting just as The Economist went to press, heads of government of the 25 European Union countries were planning, after much haggling, to agree upon a new constitution for their Union. According to Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who chaired the convention that drew up the draft text, success will turn Europe into “a political power which will talk on equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet”. But failure could be catastrophic. When EU leaders deadlocked last December, Elmar Brok, a German MEP who was a leading member of the convention, said that, if the constitution was not agreed on, Europe could slip back into the inter-state rivalries that led to the first world war.

Authors always like to talk up the significance of their own work. But it is not just promoters of the constitution who think history is in the making. Eurosceptics in Britain and elsewhere claim that it will spell the end of a Europe of independent nation-states. The Weekly Standard, the bible of American neo-conservatives, declared a few months ago that the constitution is aimed at creating a European super-state to rival the United States, and concluded that it “might prove every bit as consequential as the liberation of Baghdad”. That is a double-edged comment today, but one knows what they meant.

Yet the idea that success or failure at this summit will shake the world needs qualification. Whatever Mr Brok says, a failure to agree will not take Europe back to war, even if it could lead to a split within the EU. Nor would success necessarily mean the emergence of a new superpower called Europe. That is because the contents of the constitutional treaty are ambiguous, and its relationship to the real world open to question.

Ever since the exercise began, a debate has raged between those, such as the British government, who argue that it is largely a “tidying-up exercise” and those who believe that it represents an historic advance for the process of European unification. The truth is that it has the potential to be either. A great deal will depend on what future generations of politicians and, especially, judges, make of it. Point to any apparently significant aspect of the constitution - the Charter of Fundamental Rights or the creation of a European foreign minister, for example - and somebody from Britain's Foreign Office will be at hand to explain that it is not as significant as it sounds.

The British have done dogged and effective work to pare back the more federalist aspects of the constitution. But it still has a number of legal and institutional innovations, including the charter, the creation of a single legal personality for the EU, more majority voting, the establishment of a foreign minister and a full-time president of the European Council. Combine them, and assume that the European Court of Justice puts a federalist spin on them, and the potential for a big increase in EU power is clear.

But there is another reason for caution about the significance of this particular document: a growing doubt about the ability of European politicians to define their continent's future simply by signing new treaties. Sooner or later the world outside the conference chamber, in the form of deteriorating economies, angry electorates or a divisive foreign war, is likely to disrupt even the most elegant political compromises and legal drafting.

Dismissing European treaties as inconsequential bits of paper has, admittedly, often proved a mistake in the past. All the main achievements in European integration, from the single market to the abolition of frontier controls to the creation of a single currency, started life as words in a European treaty. Sceptics often predicted that these diplomatic achievements would never make it into the real world; John Major, a British prime minister, once said that the pledge to create the euro had about the same potency as a rain-dance. But in due time the heavens opened - and the single currency was born.

Enter reality

Yet, for all that, there is considerable potential for the real world and the constitution to collide. And if and when that happens, it will surely be the constitution that comes off worse. The very difficulty that European leaders have had in concluding negotiations points to the domestic sensitivity of the issues involved. The rise of Eurosceptic parties in this month's European elections underlines this again - as well as suggesting that ratification of the constitution will be extremely difficult. Both Britain and Poland, for example, are likely to hold referendums on the constitution; and yet, in both countries, parties deeply opposed to it came high in the polls.

Even if voters do not trash the putative constitution, European leaders might do it for them, by ignoring treaty commitments that prove too politically onerous. There are two recent examples of this process at work. The Maastricht treaty of 1992 proclaimed that EU countries would “actively and unreservedly support” a common foreign policy - language that is incorporated unchanged into the new constitution - and yet this did not stop Europe's total disarray over Iraq. Similarly, the stability and growth pact pledges members of the single currency not to run budget deficits of more than 3% of GDP, a commitment that is again enshrined unchanged in the constitution. Yet France and Germany are on course to violate the ceilings for four years in a row, and seem happy to continue doing so.

As the process of European integration advances into the heartland of domestic politics, governments are increasingly facing situations in which their commitments under EU law clash with domestic political imperatives. Current form suggests that, in such clashes, domestic politics wins. The most passionate supporters of the constitution are right that, if Europe is to become a superpower, European unity is required. But unity cannot be decreed in a conference chamber in Brussels.

Commentary feature. Would a European constitution really change the world? Article argues that for all its significance, a treaty decided by politicians cannot force unity on Europe.

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